Faulty crime perceptions drive immigrant debate

Randal C. Archibold, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, June 20, 2010

When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, the mild-mannered rancher who was shot to death on his vast property. The authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling.

"Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the U.S.-Mexico border," Giffords said.

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: Rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico's drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, FBI statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

Abstract statistics

That Krentz's death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: Perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Moreover, crime statistics, however rosy, are abstract. It takes only one well-publicized crime, like Krentz's shooting, to drive up fear.

It is also an election year, and crime and illegal immigration - and especially forging a link between the two - remain a potent boost for any campaign. Gov. Jan Brewer's popularity, once in question over promoting a sales tax increase, surged after signing the immigration bill, which is known as SB1070 but officially called the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.

Crime figures present a mixed picture, with the likes of state Sen. Russell Pearce, the Republican behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups such as Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

Violent crime rate falls

For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona's population swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available from the FBI. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000. Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 people, from 507 in 2000.

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggest that this rate may be falling in the state's biggest cities.

What is harder to pin down is how much of the crime was committed by illegal immigrants.

Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris, who opposes the new law, said that about 13 percent of his department's arrests are illegal immigrants, a number close to the estimated percentage of illegal immigrants in the local population. But the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities and is headed by Joe Arpaio, a fervent supporter of the law, has said that 19 percent of its inmates are illegal immigrants.